Everybody loves Trader Joe’s. This is the upshot of what I have heard over and over in the weeks since the California-based grocer announced that it would open this year on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Court Street in Cobble Hill.
Last Saturday, I decided to find out for myself exactly what makes the chain so alluring, so different than, well, any other grocery chain.
I went on the investigative mission with Dad, a loyalist of the store who is fond of saying that its Hawaiian-shirted clerks are the only corporate wage-earners in his life that have never done anything to make him distrust them.
We arrived at the suburban Long Island store 24 hours before a high-anxiety family barbeque. Lucky for him, the trip was easy on the nerves, and we arrived home laden with ground meat, burger buns, soda and the requisite crunchy, pseudo-healthy snack items for which Trader Joe’s is known.
The trip was a success. We got what we needed and got out, headache-less and only negligibly poorer. A clerk further enamored my father by telling him, quite randomly, that he didn’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed John F. Kennedy.
“Clearly a set-up,” the clerk said, pouring my dad a shot-sized sample of the store’s fair-trade coffee.
But I don’t think it’s only wired clerks and cheap, low-fat blue corn chips that people are falling in love with at this grocery store. I think it’s something deeper. I believe that people go to this place of Hawaiian shirts and green tea–flavored yogurt to cavort with their consumer selves without feeling bad.
People love to shop for groceries. Even children love it. I remember poring over coupons that came stuck in the Sunday newspaper, knowing that if I just found the 50-cent-off coupon for Special K, I could wrangle a brand-name breakfast out of my budget-minded mom.
Trader Joe’s summons up that feeling in me. It’s a kind of shopping that can makes you feel like you are saving money at the same time as you are spending it. Better yet, at Trader Joe’s even the hamburger buns are labeled organic.
There is also the illusion of choice. Supermarkets display myriad versions of the same product. In retrospect, it was that illusion that made those Value Shopping trips so exciting to that dependent, minor me.
The difference now is we’re the adults paying for that box of Special K, coupon or no coupon. Well, unless Dad comes along. So having a Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn is good for another thing: family bonding.
Ariella Cohen is a staff reporter at The Brooklyn Paper
The Kitchen Sink
Farmer’s delight: The new Carroll Gardens Greenmarket is in full bloom Sundays at Carroll Park along Carroll Street between Court and Smith Streets. The blueberries are sweet and so are the bouquets of wildflowers — but only through November. …
Also newly landed in Carroll Gardens is a long-awaited messenger pigeon! A mobile post office will make a weekly stop in front the Eileen Dugan Senior Center at 380 Court St., between President and Carroll streets. The ice-cream-truck-style post office will be parked there each Tuesday from 10:30 am to 2:30 pm. …
Our pal Terry Mangrum, owner of Naidre’s cafe, is eyeing a Van Brunt Street storefront for a Red Hook satellite of her cafe chain, which has locations on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and another on Henry Street in Carroll Gardens. The new Naidre’s would be Hook-born Baked cafe’s first rival for control of the growing neighborhood’s caffeine addicts. …
Remember how community groups have been forced to pay for professional analysis of the plans the city hatches for their neighborhoods? Well, now our pals at Community Board 6 want you to ask Gov. Spitzer to approve new legislation that would give the city’s neighborhood planning boards the ability to compete for state planning grants. E-mail the governor at http://161.11.121.121/govemail, or call his office at (518) 474-8390 and tell him what you think.
